Hard hitting global and local news
Hard hitting global and local news
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional
This week’s Science Friday had a segment with Lincoln Brower , an entymologist who studies the monarch butterfly. The monarch population is collapsing faster than the Arctic ice cap, with the area of their wintering grounds in Mexico going from 52 acres to less than 3 in twenty years. In Brower’s words “In previous years we had seventeen sites with colonies, this year eight of those sites had zero butterflies, and the rest of them had very few butterflies. Only one of the colonies had significant numbers. My worry is that they are winking out one by one and they may not be able to recover” There are several reasons for this, among them that the Oyamel forest is being thinned which exposes the area under the canopy and makes it harder for the butterflies to shelter from winter frost in the high forest. Monarchs have an absolutely crazy life cycle . Simplified, overwintering butterflies in Mexico (there are also populations in California) leave Mexico in late March and head for Texas, where they feed on milkweed and create a new generation. The new generation is short lived, and starts the migration north to the Great Lakes region and the east coast. They, in turn, lead to two other short lived generation, with the fourth and final one being the one that migrates back to Oyamel and overwinters. You can follow this on Journey North , a science activity for young and old. Monarch larvae are fussy eaters, depending on milkweed the way that pandas depend on bamboo. It is the only thing that they feed on in all stages of their lives. This has made them indirectly vulnerable to GMCs. The introduction of Roundup Ready crops has lead to broadcast spreading of Roundup, which kills everything EXCEPT the Roundup Ready crops, including the milkweed (and also nectar yielding plants which does nasty things for pollinators). This breaks the Monarch’s lifecycle
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.
Too many takedowns to count for David Rose who doesn’t realize that short-term fluctuations in temperature tell you little about long term trends. The latest case is that according to one computer model, the temperature sequence ending in 2012 is close to the bottom edge of the statistical uncertainty range, a point where there’s only supposed to be a 5% chance that random variation produces a temperature below the modeled range.
An Apology From Eli For about a year, Eli has been saying that the UAH (and the RSS) software for decoding the (A)MSU data is not publically available. To be honest the Rabett had expected that if it was available somebunny (Hi Lucia) would be churning away on it and others (Hi Steve) would be auditing and still others would be rewriting it in Python ( Hi Nick ) and they would have haruphed at Eli. Well, it turns out that a recent poke at this by Eli, brought a pointer to a place where this was mentioned three years ago, Dr. Christy and Dr.
Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid.
While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun gods have decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m 2 to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m 2 from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m 2 ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor. The rest is left to the industrious reader. What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured. The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP. The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out, A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m 2 [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m 2 SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m 2 [Loeb et al., 2009].